Tag Archives: writing

“What to do? Where to turn? Is there a self-identity for the writer that combines responsibility with artistic integrity? If there is, what might it be? Ask the age we live in and it might reply – the witness. And, if possible, the eyewitness.

It’s an old role, this. I was there, I saw it, it happened to me: these are seductive recommendations, and make a deep appeal to the imagination…

…… Captivity narratives, castaway narratives, war stories, civil-war stories, slavery narratives, catastrophe stories, memoirs of hard-done-by-outlaws and pirates, incest-survivor stories, Soviet union gulag stories, atrocity stories: how much more compelling we find them if we think they’re based on real events, and especially real events that have happened to the writer!

The power of such narratives is immense, especially when combined with artistic power. And the courage to write them, and sometimes to smuggle then across borders so they can be published is equally stupendous. These stories exist in a realm that is neither fact nor fiction, but perhaps both: let us call it enhanced fact.

….This is why so many people have faked such stories….

….A socially conscious writer can quite easily be charged with exploiting the misery and misfortune of the downtrodden for his own gain……The line between these is sometimes thin, and sometimes it’s only in the eye of the beholder.

Then, too, the eyewitness can be a kind of voyeur.

…What did Yeats mean when he told a future generation of poets to cast a cold eye on life and death? Why does the eye have to be so cold?

…The eye is cold because it is clear, and it is clear because its owner must look: he must look at everything. Then she must record.

…the secret is that it isn’t the writer who decides whether or not his work is relevant. Instead it’s the reader. ”

Extracted from Margaret Atwood’s ‘Prospero, the Wizard of Oz, Mephisto & Co”, in On Writers and Writing, Virago, 2003:104-109

The 5th February 2004 was my son’s 8th birthday. That evening a group of Chinese illegal workers were taken by gang masters to dig for cockles in Morecambe Bay, just behind our house. It is not known exactly how many were in the cockling group.

The bay was our playground, although – like all locals – we were hugely respectful of its power. The tides of the bay are as notorious and treacherous as the sinking sands beneath. They have always followed obscure patterns, often remaining invisible until the sands are completely encircled.

21 bodies were recovered in the following days. One further body was found in 2010. It is understood at least one is still missing.

There was a time, a pivotal time. She can no longer recall how it came to be. Did she feel the momentum? She felt the moment.

The moment was marked. It was signified. A decision to step away, step back, step beyond an identity she had. It is now no longer possible for her to remember where the identity came from – she may have created it, it may have been given to her – anyway she couldn’t help but be it. She still has it, wears it in public.

But today, in this moment, she is going to betray it. She is going to respond to something else, something alien, a different space, a different possibility of being.

She steps back from the noise, the shrieks, the movement, the colour into the silent, shaded tile-dark Gothic corridor and begins to walk – step by step, echo by echo – until she reaches the large wooden door.

She stops for a second to reconcile her difference. From here there is no other way forward, only back.

She knocks. A discernible silencing of the mannered murmur behind the door. A long pause, hollow in the doomy corridor….

“Can I speak to Mrs. Higson?” She can’t resist the edge of defiance in her voice, though she can hear it.

The door closes. Time passes. The door opens. Mrs. Higson – transgressed by possession of a steaming mug, a half-eaten biscuit and a crumb on her cheek – regarding her silently, quizzically, commandingly.

“I wrote a poem for the school magazine”, she says.

Mrs. Higson’s eyes widen, but she holds her face together – just. Wordlessly she holds out her hand, takes the paper, acknowledges it, nods, closes the door.

She’s done it.

She stands for longer than she should, breathing – long enough to hear the surprise crescendo behind the door.

She moves away.

The space closes behind her, its residue in print, on a page, in a school magazine from 1977 that she keeps in a box somewhere, in a room, behind a door.

I loved the PhD process – it felt like the best kind of holiday. But the post-doc slump was a limbo where potential only served to paralyze.

I spent three years labouring to construct new paths, only to dither at my own crossroads, punchdrunk and confused. Everyone knows you meet the devil at the crossroads if you hang around there too long.

The recent UK election results were a slap in the face though, weren’t they?

A wake-up. A call to arms.

I’d love to be mistaken, but I have a sense that I’m about to witness the dissolution of many things I hold dear to my homeland, my landscape, my reality.

So what can I do?

I can write. I’ve always written. I’ve never not been able to write.

But I have always taken it for granted.

After the PhD, I trained as an English teacher and have spent time volunteering in classrooms with teenagers and adults who are learning English. They are some of the most wonderful people I have ever met. Their stories are inspirational – how brave must you be to leave everything, and perhaps everyone you have loved and begin again in a new and distant unknown?

How inspiring when a thirty year old woman who has never had the opportunity to be literate in any language struggles through her first formal lesson, returning the following week having diligently conquered not only the manipulation of a pencil but all the letters of our Roman alphabet. How not to shed a tear watching her quietly and proudly score full marks in the spelling test?

So now I see the privilege and the power of writing. But how to use it?

I asked a professional writer I met lately. She told me, ‘You have to be selfish to be a writer. You start with competitions online; that’s how you get into it’.

I didn’t have to think about this much to know this is not my kind of practice.

Then I found myself working in a wonderful, integrated but temporary environment. It feels both entirely natural and starkly unusual to work in this little utopia, in this company of people that properly represent the diversity of our society. We are working on a piece about transformation.

It was when I was pouring tea and affirming – “Yes, yes. We must give voice’.

So that’s it then.

This is what I can do. So I will do it. I will gather stories and give witness.

I can use all my scholarship; the languages I have learned, the linguistics I have studied, my Social History degree. I can use the decades of translating and interpreting, the years spent lending my voice to others.

Isn’t this ‘translation art’, after all?

I can use all I learned at CeNTraL (the Centre for Narratives and Transformative Learning) from wonderful women like Jane Speedy, Susanne Gannon and Tami Spry; the Writing as Inquiry, the Narrative Interviewing, the Collective Biography, the Auto-ethnography.

I will wrangle with words until I am a wordwright. I will write, so the weight of the words may help right the imbalances in our homeland, our landscape, our reality.

Nana Froufrou does [w]righting.

So now I’m packing my pencil and heading out. It may take time to develop this practice, but I’ll keep you posted with notes and sketches and voices….

The author

Only a handful of folks globally have studied the poetics of natural sign languages. Nana's PhD investigation evolved from her own practice in theatre and performance interpreting, and took in Derrida, visual art, embodiment, gesture-dance, cinematics, and some musical theory on the way. She continues to translate and interpret whilst developing her own creative practices of 'translation art' and '[w]righting'.

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